What The Dead Know

“Arthur Goode kidnapped more than one boy,” Gloria said, as if reading his thoughts. “But that was before your time, too. He kidnapped a newspaper-delivery boy here in Baltimore and made him watch while…At any rate, he released the delivery boy unharmed. Goode was later executed in Florida, for similar crimes there.”

“I remember that,” said the woman in the bed. “Because it was like us, but not like us. Because we were sisters. And because-”

Here she broke down. She brought her knees to her chest, hugged them with her good arm, the one not bandaged and wrapped, and cried the way someone might heave after food poisoning. The tears and sobs kept coming, unstoppable. Infante began to worry that she might dehydrate herself.

“This is Heather Bethany,” Gloria said. “Or was, many years ago. Apparently it’s been a long time since she’s used her real name.”

“Where has she has been? What happened to her sister?”

“Killed,” moaned the keening woman. “Murdered. Her neck snapped right in front of me.”

“And who did this? Where did it happen?” Infante had been standing all this time, but now he pulled up a chair, realizing he would be there for hours, that he would need to set up the tape recorder, take an official statement. He wondered if the case was really the sensation that Gloria said it was. But even if she was exaggerating its fame, it was the kind of story that would mutate into a clusterfuck when the news got out. They would have to proceed slowly, be delicate in their handling of it. “Where have you been, and why has it taken so long for you to come forward?”

Bracing herself on her right arm, Heather returned herself to a sitting position, then wiped her eyes and nose with the back of her hand, a child’s gesture.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you. I just can’t. I wish I had never said anything in the first place.”

Infante shot Gloria a what-the-fuck look. Again she shrugged helplessly.

“She doesn’t want to be Heather Bethany,” Gloria said. “She wants to go back to the life she’s made for herself and put this behind her. Her sister’s dead. She says her parents are dead, too, and that jibes with my memory. There is no Heather Bethany, for better or worse.”

“Whatever she calls herself, wherever she’s been, she is by her own account the witness to the murder of a- How old was your sister?”

“Fifteen. And I was just about to turn twelve.”

“The murder of a fifteen-year-old girl. She doesn’t get to drop a bomb like that and waltz out of here.”

“There’s no one to arrest,” the woman in the bed said. “He’s long gone. Everyone’s long gone. There’s no point to any of this. I hit my head, I said something that I never meant to say. Let’s just forget about it, okay?”

Infante motioned Gloria to follow him into the hall.

“Who is that?”

“Heather Bethany.”

“No, I mean, what name is she going by now? Where does she live? What has she been up to? The cop who brought her in said the car was registered to Penelope Jackson. Is that her?”

“Even if I do have that information-and I’m not saying I do-I’m not authorized to give it to you.”

“Fuck authorized. The law is really clear on this, Gloria, all the way up to the Supreme fucking Court. She was driving a car, she was in an accident. She has to provide ID. If she doesn’t want to do that, she can go straight from here to jail.”

For a moment Gloria dropped all her arch mannerisms-the cocked eyebrow, the half smirk. Strangely, it made her even less attractive. “I know, I know. But bear with me. This woman has been through hell, and she wants to hand you the clearance of a lifetime, if you can be a little patient. Why not indulge her for a day or two? The way I see it, she’s genuinely terrified of revealing her current identity. She needs to trust you before she can tell you everything.”

“Why? What’s the big deal? Unless she’s wanted for some other crime?”

“She swears up and down that she’s not, that her only concern-and this is a direct quote-is becoming ‘wacko of the week’ on cable news. Once she’s revealed as Heather Bethany, her life as she knows it is over. She wants to find a way to give you the case without giving up herself.”

“I don’t know, Gloria. This isn’t my call. Something like this has to go up the chain of command, and they still might send me back to lock her up.”

“Lock her up and she won’t give you the Bethany case. She’ll say it was a delusion born of the accident. Look, you should be delirious with her terms. She doesn’t want any publicity, and your department hates being in the media. I’m the loser here, the one who won’t get any bump, and may not even get paid.”

At this, she reverted to form, batting her eyelashes and puffing out her lips in a monstrous pout. Shit, if anyone resembled Baby Huey, it was Gloria, with that fish mouth and beak of a nose. Beak-that was it, he had the image in his mind now. Not a beak, but a bill. Baby Huey was definitely a duck, and lord fuck a duck, as the old saying went.

CHAPTER 5

A radio was playing somewhere. Or perhaps it was a television in a nearby room. Her room was dead silent, and the light was finally fading, which she found restful. She thought about work. Had she been missed yet? She had called in sick yesterday, but today she hadn’t known what to do. It was a long-distance call, but she didn’t have a calling card handy and she wasn’t sure what would happen if she went through the hospital switchboard and she couldn’t get to the pay phone in the hall without going past the patrolman outside her door. Did calling cards mask one’s movements anyway? She couldn’t take the chance. She had to protect the only thing she had, this sixteen-year existence built on someone’s death, just as everything in her life had been made possible by someone’s death. It was her real life, for better or worse, the longest life she had inhabited to date. For sixteen years she’d managed to have this thing that others would call a normal life, and she wasn’t about to give it up.

It wasn’t much of a life, to be sure. She had no real friends, only friendly colleagues and clerks who knew her well enough to smile. She didn’t even have a pet. But she had an apartment, small and spare and neat. She had a car, her precious Camry, a purchase she had rationalized because of the commute to work, an hour on a good day. Lately she’d been listening to books on tapes, fat womanly novels as she thought of them. Maeve Binchy, Gail Godwin, Marian Keyes. Pat Conroy-not a woman, obviously, but the same kind of storyteller, unafraid of big emotions and big stories. Shit , she had three tapes due back at the library Saturday. For sixteen years she had never been late for anything-a payment, a library book, an appointment. She hadn’t dared to be. What happened if you turned in tapes late? Did the fines accrue? Did they report you somewhere?

It was ironic, given her work on Y2K compliance, but she had long lived in fear of centralization, a day when the machines would learn to speak to one another, compare notes. Even as she was paid to prevent it, she had been secretly rooting for a systemic breakdown that would wipe all the tapes clean, destroy every bit of institutional memory. The pieces were out there, somewhere, waiting for someone to put them together. This woman-she has the name of a child who died in Florida in 1963. How odd-because this woman, who resembles her, had the name of a child who died in Nebraska in 1962. Yet this woman was a child who died in Kansas in 1964. And this one? She was from Ohio , born in 1962 as well .

At least it would be easy to remember who she was now: Heather Bethany, born April 3, 1963. Resident of Algonquin Lane 1966-78. Ace student at Dickey Hill Elementary. Where had the family lived before? An apartment in Randallstown, but she wouldn’t be expected to remember anything about that time. That was the tricky part. Not knowing what she should know but remembering what she wouldn’t know.

What else? School #201. Dickey Hill. Predictable jokes about the name. A newer building at the time. Jungle